Marching with the right women

Too many Western feminists remain mute on women Muslim fundamentalists.

After much opposition from Islamists, the temporary constitution for Iraq finally agreed to this week sets a 25 per cent quota for women in the transitional assembly. Iraqi women's groups had wanted 40 per cent.

At a meeting in Washington last week, Iraqi minister Nesreen Berwari said a stronger role for women was vital for Iraq to move forward. But many Iraqi women believed the Iraqi Governing Council did not have enough women on it, and those who were there may not be "the right women", said Anita Sharma, director of the Woodrow Wilson Centre.

Ah, but who are the right women?

The women in the 1890s who organised a petition of 23,000 signatures to try to stop women getting the vote in Australia were not the right women. The women of the American religious right, who would deny women not only legal abortion but also contraception, are not the right women. Not many feminists would think of Margaret Thatcher as a right woman.

The women who would support the imposition of Islamic Sharia law are not the right women either. Yet Western feminists who wouldn't have a bar of the Right to Life seem barely able to criticise Muslim fundamentalists who happen to be women.

British Labour MP Ann Cryer, speaking about forced child marriages among some immigrant groups in Britain, told The Sunday Observer recently that entire communities (including women) are complicit in what amounts to the statutory rape of under-aged girls. "But there is no appetite among left-wing campaigners to tackle the issue because they are terrified of being called racist."

Muslim leaders in Canada last October elected a 30-member council to set up a tribunal intended to persuade Canadian courts to uphold decisions made under Islamic law. An organisation called the International Campaign for the Defence of Women's Rights in Iran asks women worldwide to protest against the Sharia court in Canada.

This and many other such actions can be found on websites set up by women fighting against fundamentalism. There are hundreds of such organisations: Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Sexisme et Droits des Femmes, the International Campaign Against Stoning.

Just as Christian women (with varying success) have, Muslim women are demanding that their religion accommodate women's equality. Some are challenging the way men have hijacked a religion they say does grant them rights; some say parts of the Koran need to be reinterpreted; and some believe women's liberation can only come through a complete separation of Islam from the state. Just as Western women have, women in Islamic countries have to fight opposition from other women.

They unfortunately also get little support from many Western women who, in the name of tolerance, buy the line of those middle-class, educated Muslim women who insist that in Islam women have "a different kind of freedom".

Criticising Islam is not racist, writes Maryam Namazie on the Iranian Secular Society website: "An attack on Islamic states and laws is not only permissible but a requisite given the indescribable violence and misogyny meted out by Islam in political power.

"In Iran the number of witnesses required to prove a crime is higher if the witnesses are female. The legal age for girls to marry is nine. Any form of friendship or association between the sexes outside marriage is punishable by flogging, imprisonment, forced marriage and stoning to death. These are not merely a different kind of freedom."

There are poor, uneducated women who support stonings for adultery, forced marriages, the genital mutilation of their daughters (the NSW Government has reported that 40 women were treated for the effects of female genital mutilation last year). Once it would have said of them that they were victims of false consciousness (however patronising that was), and probably in the vast majority of cases they are.

But there are also well-off Muslim women who, against mountains of evidence to the contrary, defend Islam against any charge that it oppresses women. If Islam is as liberating as they say it is, their voices should be loudest in condemning the abuses in its name.

Cultural change in Islamic societies has to come from within. The women who are driving the changes, who are the best hope not only for better lives for women but for an end to the "clash of civilisations", are the right women. You don't support them by saying the things they are fighting against are culturally valid.

"We are not far from those days when women will be throwing away or burning those imposed veils, celebrating the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the beginning of a new era of secularism and an egalitarian society in Iran," the editor of Women in the Middle East, Azam Kamguian, told a conference in London in November.

Too optimistic perhaps, considering the results of the recent election. But in spirit at least, on International Women's Day on Monday, I'll be marching with her.